Leisure, Pleasure, and Entertainment

45TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE EAST-CENTRAL AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES (EC/ASECS)

University of Delaware
November 6-8, 2014

We’re gonna party like it’s 1769! A culture of leisure, pleasure, and entertainment grew from infancy to maturity during the eighteenth century. The changing face of public places—theatres, pleasure gardens, taverns, coffeehouses and brothels—reflects the dynamic change underway in arts and culture. These developments can be seen on both sides of the Atlantic. Pleasure was also a mentality, something that people sought in their day-to-day lives.

This conference seeks to address a range of questions relating to the 18th-century pleasure culture. What constituted the material culture of pleasure? How were leisure and pleasure commodified, produced, and consumed? How were leisure, pleasure, and entertainment regulated or suppressed? How were emerging forms of pleasure represented in popular literature and the visual arts? What’s the relationship between class and leisure? What were the more obscure or private forms of leisure? How did the pursuit of pleasure and entertainment affect religion and politics (or vice versa)?

We invite papers from all academic fields in which leisure, pleasure, and entertainment are significant themes of continuing interest. And, as always, we will do our best to find panels for papers addressed to entirely different themes and interests. Please join us at the University of Delaware, for an intellectually stimulating – and pleasurable – conference.

Proposals for papers should be sent directly to the session chairs no later than 15 June 2014. Please limit your abstracts to roughly 250 words and include your institutional affiliation and e-mail address. You should also let the session chair know of any audio-visual needs and special scheduling requests.